Robert Fisk: A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect

The Independent
Published: 12 October 2007

The story of the last century’s first Holocaust – Winston Churchill
used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi
murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of
modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with
Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews idle ones.

Turkey’s reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to
destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need
to "resettle" their Armenian population – as the Germans were to speak
later of the Jews of Europe – the true intentions of Enver Pasha’s
Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite clear.

On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document
exists), Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an
instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the
tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been
informed that the government… has decided to destroy completely all
the indicated persons living in Turkey… Their existence must be
terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard
must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience."

These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS
killers in 1941.

Taner Akcam, a prominent – and extremely brave – Turkish scholar who
has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish
documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack
for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish
archives that individual Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of
their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same
time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient
protection and food for the Armenians during their "resettlement".
This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where
officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas
chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva
that they were being well cared for and well fed.

Ottoman Turkey’s attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in
the Middle East – the Armenians, descended from the residents of
ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king
Drtad converted from paganism in AD301 – is a history of almost
unrelieved horror at the hands of Turkish policemen and soldiers, and
Kurdish tribesmen.

In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting
Turkey’s Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several
historians – including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed
venture at Gallipoli – have asked whether the Turkish victory there
did not give them the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians
of Asia Minor, a people of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood,
with what Churchill called "merciless fury".

Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people’s persecution
and deportation, a document that is as detailed as the maps of Europe
that show the railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians
of Erzerum, for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and
then to Erzinjan and on to Sivas province.

The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes
outside villages, the women and children then driven on into the
desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one
mass grave I myself discovered on a hillside at Hurgada in present-day
Syria, there were thousands of skeletons, mostly of young people –
their teeth were perfect. I even found a 100-year-old Armenian woman
who had escaped the slaughter there and identified the hillside for
me.

There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians
appear to care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day
Armenia. Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian,
actually told me that "days, weeks, even months go by" when he does
not think of the genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an
Armenian friend is that 70 years of Stalinism and official Soviet
silence on the genocide deleted the historical memory in eastern
Armenia – the present-day state of Armenia.

Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia – in
what is now Turkey – lost their families and lands and still seek
acknowledgement and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians
did not lose their lands.

Source: ece